Did My Ad Really Work? Closing the Loop on Data Onboarding

Why is there such disparity between TV and digital video ad spend today? The amount of online channels is nearly endless, and digital ads have far more potential to be interactive and engaging than traditional television ads. Online advertising is expected to grow by leaps and bounds, yet many marketers still are hesitant to increase their investments. In 2013, $2.8 billion was spent on digital video ads. That's double what was spent in 2010, but it is still dwarfed by the $74.5 billion spent on television ads in the same year.

The reason for the chasm in ad spend is that until now, marketers simply haven't been able to accurately determine whether their ads were effective in driving sales or even being seen on digital platforms.

Currently, the marketing industry is abuzz with the impact of data onboarding practices. This term describes the way marketers are able to bridge an offline medium (those precious, valuable customer "silhouettes") to an online medium (a database of online "personas"). Data onboarding is an enormous opportunity for marketers to take their offline data and transfer it online to more easily and accurately connect to potential and future customers, providing brands with the ability to reach them instantaneously and serve targeted ads, messages, emails and relevant content. Here are three reasons why the practice of data onboarding is completely invaluable to modern marketing.

1. Make offline databases actionable for online audiences and extend existing investments with CRM softwareMarketers spend years—decades even—cultivating data to create CRM silhouettes of their customers that provide them with valuable information on their preferences, habits and demographic categorizations. This data is created from a combination of in-store behaviors, loyalty memberships and other such services.

The ability to extend CRM databases to online tactics is a major step in the collective movement to bridge this offline/online gap. Data onboarding allows marketers to make their various—and often disjointed—databases actionable, drawing critical insights and using them to create and deliver highly targeted campaigns.